Reddit signals ominous upcoming "changes” for old.reddit.com
arstechnica.com
Reddit says the beloved site is used for some "bad behavior."

As of a few minutes ago old.reddit.com now seems to requre logging in to access it.

Shame as it was still the best place to browse for info about some niche interests.

Edit: Seems like they might be testing the change as it is hit or miss at the moment.

Edit: Adding this to My flilters in uBlock Origin seems to fix the issue for the time being:

||reddit.com^$header=referer:

  • captain_spicard@lemmy.worldEnglish
    264·
    9 days ago

    I discovered Lemmy last week. Lurked for a while, then finally created an account. The experience is much better than Reddit so I say good riddance.

  • BuckFutter@timeyak.comEnglish
    882·
    9 days ago

    Yep loved old.reddit but nope, no more. Happy to be a Lemmyor now 😀 or whats the correct term? Lol. Cheers!

  • db2@lemmy.worldEnglish
    68·
    9 days ago

    Fuck reddit.

    If you need the old info download the archive. 99% of anything newer than 3 years is going to be bot slop. There’s zero reason to go to reddit intentionally.

        • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          14·
          9 days ago

          I’d wager that older dumps are higher quality, before the mass redactions and deletions of the various exoduses. If you’re looking for up to date information on current topics, it’s time to look for (or build) other places.

          • trebach@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            22·
            9 days ago

            These are Pushshift torrents from 2005 to 2025: https://sciop.net/datasets/reddit. There are two data sets, one by month and the other by subreddit. Each is about 3.5 TB compressed and based on the compression ratio I’ve seen, about 30 TB uncompressed. This is without any sort of media, just text.

            Reddit sent AcademicTorrents a request to take them down so AI models couldn’t use them as a way to avoid paying Reddit hundreds of millions of dollars for training data.

    • Redacted@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      16·
      9 days ago

      Agree.

      Most of it sure, but there are still some active subreddits with human involvement I wish would switch to Lemmy.

      • Blibly@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        9 days ago

        Same. I have 1 or 2 subreddits I check for info/advice that I wish would just migrate over here. It just isn’t worth opening the reddit app and dealing with the worst of humanity being pushed on me anymore.

    • SnoringEarthworm@piefed.caEnglish
      4·
      9 days ago

      How feasible is it (legally, technically) to host a federated, read-only copy of Reddit data from before The Enshittening?

      • db2@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        9 days ago

        It depends how mad Temu Elon aka Steve Huffman gets about it. He incorrectly believes everything belongs to him.

      • fizzle@quokk.auEnglish
        3·
        8 days ago

        Why bother?

        Its all long since been injested by every gen AI model around, just ask one.

        • takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          5·
          8 days ago

          The problem with AI is that while 80% of the time it will provide correct information, but 20% of time it will generate very convincingly sounded bullshit.

          This is the danger of it… You test it few times and then you start trusting it. Kind of like that farmer that destroyed his whole crop.

          • fizzle@quokk.auEnglish
            2·
            8 days ago

            I agree. However I don’t think answers sourced from reddit are any more accurate.

            • takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              3·
              8 days ago

              Yeeeesss…, but typically it is easier to determine how reliable the person is from the test of the context.

              Since Gemini is fed by the reason directly or might be fun exercise to ask it about yourself and while in some questions it will answer correctly or just loves to invent new things.

              This works especially well if the person owning the account did not worry as much about privacy. So you hear many true things and also a lot of bullshit.

              • fizzle@quokk.auEnglish
                1·
                8 days ago

                typically it is easier to determine how reliable the person is from the test of the context.

                sure. that’s an advantage of reading off reddit.

                an advantage of asking an LLM is that it can consider multiple reddit posts and stack overflow and whatever else.

                you’re right that there’s an eternal problem of determining whether information is accurate or just confidently incorrect, but I don’t think that applies exclusively to chat bots.

    • mrbutterscotch@feddit.orgEnglish
      3·
      8 days ago

      Is there an easy way of doing that? As in is there an archive specifically for reddit or do you mean on one of the internet archive websites?

    • iamthetot@piefed.caEnglish
      2·
      8 days ago

      There’s zero reason to go to reddit intentionally

      Know of a viable replacement for r/bapcsalescanada?

      • db2@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        8 days ago

        Run your own discussion board and literally tell people about it.

        • iamthetot@piefed.caEnglish
          2·
          8 days ago

          I don’t really have an interest in running a public board, and the reason I use(d) that subreddit was because I am also not interested in looking for the deals myself.

          However, from another comment, redlib looks like a decent solution for the time being.

  • Samsy@lemmy.mlEnglish
    66·
    9 days ago

    Welcome to Lemmy for the last reddit users, that used old.reddit, looks like we are complete now. The rest of reddit are noobs and bots.

    • Mikekm@lemmy.worldEnglish
      42·
      9 days ago

      I came here three years ago when they killed the API and Reddit is Fun on mobile. I refuse to use their mobile site but still used their desktop. If they kill old.reddit I guess I’m done then.

      • Scrollone@feddit.itEnglish
        11·
        9 days ago

        You can do it. Just delete your account. I did it. I live without Reddit now, and I’m happy. After a while you won’t miss that cesspool

      • WhyIHateTheInternet@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        9 days ago

        Same here but when they killed Joey App. But I haven’t gone back for anything and refuse to use it at all. It’s so bad every time my wife shows me shit on there.

      • Regrettable_incident@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        8 days ago

        Same as me, except I never went back. I don’t spend as much time here as I used to on reddit, but most of that was wasted time anyway.

      • Tollana1234567@lemmy.todayEnglish
        1·
        8 days ago

        i only use it on the browser. got banned last year during the purges. you can make another acc after a while(unknown), with a fork, that reddit is not used to. i just use the niche subs, no interest in the main subs(where most are happening)

    • HerbGrower@slrpnk.netEnglish
      6·
      9 days ago

      Used Lemmy for a while but still browsed reddit logged out a bit. I noticd this recently so its only Lemmy now.

      • takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        8 days ago

        BTW: there is libredirect browser extension which redirects Reddit to libreddit instances.

        I am saying this, so people use that instead of giving up and logging in.

        • HerbGrower@slrpnk.netEnglish
          3·
          8 days ago

          Nope, not listening. I am using the increased friction as a reason for giving up and not using reddit at all.

          • takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            2·
            8 days ago

            Yeah that’s even better. I think the libreddit code could perhaps be used to also to help bootstrap some communities on Lemmy (by just posting the same links).

            Or maybe that’s already happening?

    • DFX4509B@lemmy.wtfEnglish
      5·
      8 days ago

      Redlib still works, but it’s read-only (not a problem for me, I killed my Reddit account last year), and it’s probably a matter of time before that’s killed off too.

  • brownsugga@lemmy.worldEnglish
    421·
    9 days ago

    I knew it was over when the CEO payed himself 200 million the year before it went public (or whatever) he basically looted the fucking place cause he knew it’d be worthless soon after

      • eleijeep@piefed.socialEnglish
        7·
        9 days ago

        Yeah but the site is worthless now, so the stock price will follow when the market realises what’s going on.

        • Scrollone@feddit.itEnglish
          9·
          9 days ago

          Yes, Reddit now is truly worthless because:

          • it’s riddled with bots, so humans can’t have real conversations
          • AI companies already scraped all old content and now they can’t scrape the newer content because it’s poisoned by AI itself
          • Google won’t index subreddits anymore now that you can’t see the content unless logged in
        • ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          2·
          8 days ago

          I promise you your definition of worthless is far different than an investors

          The stock market is overwhelmingly owned by about 10% of Americans who tend to be on the very wealthy side and the “mindless capitalism drones who simply want number to grow” side. They just see user growth and applaud. They love this change and all the changes Reddit has made over the past few years because it means harder to scrape for free and more likely to convert casual browsers to users

          What is potentially killing Reddit (and twitter, Facebook, etc) is that advertisers are starting to lose patience with bot activity, which is the overwhelming amount of content on social media. The misleading statistic that those companies throw out is that bots make up a (relatively) small amount of accounts, which is arguably true, but sidesteps that those bots post like crazy. Thus the “power user” effect, where 5-20% of the user base makes up like 90+% of content. Advertisers are getting wise to the fact that an overwhelming number of social media interactions are just nothing (and no one they can sell to) and they’re starting to demand better analytics as well as run their own

          This is where Reddit is potentially screwed; meta has dozens of other things to fall back on besides ad revenue. Twitter has Elon propping it up. But this is still pretty wishful thinking, the reality is that Reddits valuation will likely be propped up by institutional investors for years, maybe decades, on the hope of something that never comes (see: Tesla). The quality of the site is essentially irrelevant

  • eggpl4nt@lemmy.worldEnglish
    38·
    8 days ago

    This news finally convinced me to make a Lemmy account so I can participate a little more instead of lurk. That, and generally how awful Reddit has been becoming for like, several years at this point, since the IPO.

    I’ve swapped out RedReader on my phone’s home screen with Boost; though I think it’ll take some time to break the Reddit addiction.

    I am looking forward to seeing Lemmy’s growth!

      • eggpl4nt@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        8 days ago

        Yeah, it’s quite active now, how exciting! I started browsing it just like I did RedReader last night and it didn’t feel like I was missing out on news or conservations. Also I like the Boost UI in some ways more than RedReader’s, so I’m sure that’s helping make the transition easier lol. Reddit really shot itself in the foot destroying all the popular 3rd party apps, reddit is fun was my beloved. RedReader is nice to have still available, but it honestly doesn’t hold a candle to rif’s nice UI/UX. Boost being basically on par with rif for me is making letting go of reddit all the more easier.

        • Vogi@piefed.socialEnglish
          3·
          7 days ago

          Welcome to the last human holdout on the world wide web.

          I believe Boost Has Ads right? Im using Summit by @idunnololz@lemmy.world and its phenomenal. It has no ads and is highly customisable or at least the parts you would want to customise are. Its UI is up to date and feels right at home with the rest of Android Apps. Maybe you can give it a try, or not if Boost works for you. :)

    • Allero@lemmy.todayEnglish
      5·
      8 days ago

      Welcome! Lemmy lives on active participation, and you made the right call. Besides, the chatter here can get lively!

      Not to mention we have some Lemmywide games and activities from time to time (the most recent being the Season 4 of !thebutton@lemmy.zip, the basic idea of which you may recognize from Reddit), and you’ll need an account to take part!

    • imminent_nebula@lemmy.caEnglish
      4·
      8 days ago

      I created a new account a year ago to lurk instead of comment, but you’re right, participation = growth. I’ll be joining in again.

    • lemmygarden@lemmy.todayEnglish
      3·
      7 days ago

      I was addicted to reddit. They killed the Reddit is Fun app that I used every day for 10 years, so I had to switch to Lemmy. It was the best thing that happened to me. It took me a few days to stop missing reddit but I am so much happier with Lemmy and never want to go back there again.

    • auzy1@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      8 days ago

      I’m not sure we want a lot of the trolls or bots here… Fortunately, I feel like they’d go to instances which lemmy world is de-federated from fortunately though.

      It’s fairly obvious in a lot of the local subreddits that there are a huge amount of lobbyists (same as facebook). Like the gun/pro-vaping people posting at 2AM really stand out in them

  • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.worldEnglish
    271·
    9 days ago

    Interestingly enough, old.reddit users are in the single digit percentages:

    Even if they weren’t hostile towards old.reddit (the ads are far less invasive and effective), they could make a strong argument for not wanting to support a dwindling, tiny userbase.

    • MangoCats@feddit.itEnglish
      15·
      8 days ago

      I’ve moderated a subreddit for about 15 years now, it’s built up to ~40K members and ~100K visitors per week, ~1M views per month, and over 95-99% of that traffic is mobile (varies by the day). New Reddit (desktop) runs 0.5-3%, and old.reddit doesn’t even register in the bar graphs. Still, my shortcuts all go to old.reddit.com - and not just for moderation, but it’s also how I browse reddit.com.

      If they cut off my old.reddit.com interface, I’ll likely abandon my moderator’s post - no telling what happens to that community after that happens.

      • KingPorkChop@lemmy.caEnglish
        3·
        8 days ago

        Don’t abandon the subreddit. Make a new one here. Then lock the subreddit with a pinned post pointing to the new Lemmy one.

        • MangoCats@feddit.itEnglish
          2·
          8 days ago

          There’s an interesting thing about scale… At 40K subscribers (collected over 15 years), my subreddit is pretty small niche. I tried duplicating it on the Digg reboot last year (yes, Digg sucked, sucks, and will continue to suck for the foreseeable future, but it was an informative experiment anyway)… because the niche is so narrow, and the Digg user base was so small, it never flipped over into growth mode. I’d promote it, get a couple of posts and a couple of subscribers, then crickets. After several rounds of that I walked away from new Digg. Meanwhile, on reddit with its billion+ users, 100 million+ active daily, the narrow niche continues to grow and because it has enough content contributing users, it’s not my personal soap box, it’s a truly user maintained community. But, that 90-9-1 rule definitely applies, probably even more skewed in my experience: 40K subscribers, probably less than 40 occasionally active content posters - an average of maybe 4 new posts per day, but… 40 posters are enough to keep the 40K engaged and growing.

        • The_v@lemmy.worldEnglish
          7·
          8 days ago

          Before the IPO, close to 100% of old.reddit likely contributed. For submitting, the old.reddit interface had better options for the experienced user. It was faster and easier to submit complex longer comments and posts.

          The interface isn’t that great for reading comments/post. The third party phone apps did it better.

          Besides you had to have a tiny bit of experience with the platform to know how to find that setting. Not something most casual readers who hit the site via a search engine would know to do.

          Since the IPO it’s likely mostly few old-timers checking the niche subs. Probably very little engagement. Honestly, it’s likely still around because of some critical tool for moderators or bots that would be extremely expensive to upgrade. Definitely not because they care about the user.

          • cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            8 days ago

            Probably why the quality of posts seems to have gone down (IMO) and the quantity of bot posts has gone way up recently too. It basically turned to shit shortly after the IPO. When I saw an add for reddit on TV I knew it’s in peak enshittify mode.

          • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            4·
            8 days ago

            the 90 9 1 rule is the rule of activity. its basically saying that 90% of users are lurkers, 9% contribute some, and 1% are major contributors.

            • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.worldEnglish
              3·
              8 days ago

              I’ve often seen it adjusted for things like Reddit as such:

              90% of users only view

              9% of users vote

              1% of users comment

            • LazyBaby@lemmy.zipEnglish
              2·
              8 days ago

              Thank you. That definitely lines up with my experience moderating subreddits and communities.

          • megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            9·
            8 days ago

            The US was the first place smartphones took off and in the first couple years iPhone was the smartphone, so the initial set of adopters got iPhones because android wasn’t really a consideration. Then the network effect, people got what their friends or family had. Also, since a lot of people get their phones payed for through their cellular carrier contract, they not super price sensitive since the cost was buried in a monthly bill.

            So lots of people are used to IOS, and don’t see a reason to switch. Especially now with the one major differentiator, walled garden vs open platform, is disappearing with Google locking down their platform.

            • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              8 days ago

              in the first couple years iPhone was the smartphone

              Blackberry was the smartphone in the first half of the '00s. And circa 2005 even Windows Mobile smartphones were gaining some traction (by “smartphone” I mean devices that are essentially handheld computers that can run apps and do a lot more than just calls and texting). They both got swamped by the iPhone because RIM and Microsoft were short-sighted idiots who failed to see the potential market and saw no need to improve their devices much, until it was too late. The iPhone wasn’t the first, it was the best (at the time at least).

            • mursejoy@lemmy.zipEnglish
              32·
              8 days ago

              Once Android bootloaders got locked down I jumped ship. I loved custom ROMs. I also used to side load a lot of apks/emulate games. Now my Steam Deck is my dedicated emulation hand held, before that a modded 3DS. My only reasons to stay on Android disappeared.

              Also iMessage is just so much better than allo/gmessages/hangouts/etc. I waited for over a decade for Google to create and stick with an ecosystem.

              I loaded all my music on Google play music, then it was google music all access subscriptions, then it was YouTube music.

              Tried to get the family into hangouts video, then it changed to duo+allo, then they killed allo so half the family abandoned duo…

              It’s an endless cycle with Google. The kill more apps than most companies will ever create. Nobody has any buy in with their ecosystem because it’s dogshit.

                • mursejoy@lemmy.zipEnglish
                  1·
                  8 days ago

                  I really was only playing GBC/GBA games on Android. I meant that I went on to emulate those GBC/GBA games on 3DS and didn’t need Android anymore.

                  3DS is pretty much the only system that I prefer to play on original hardware.

                  But dang that is an impressive piece of kit! I kinda want one just as a backup to my N3dsXL.

          • The_v@lemmy.worldEnglish
            9·
            8 days ago

            When iPhone launched it was targeted at the general public.

            Blackberry had successfully dominated the businesses. In apps, texting, e-mailing etc they were light-years ahead of everyone else at the time. Ther had a bit of a learning curve to figure out but it got the job done. Many of the things that the iPhone became famous for were blackberry inventions. They were also highly customizable with tons of options where you could tweak all sorts of stuff aka pretty complicated.

            So Apple went after the consumer market where they had a major fan base built up from the iPod. The thing about the iPod that set it apart from other MP3 was it was extremely simple to use. Like your 50 year old MBA boss could use it simple (if someone loaded the MP3’s for him) and no customization.

            So the phone they made was about the same size as an iPod, and extremely simply to use. No customization because that created complexity. It was all tightly controlled.

            Pretty soon it became the dominant phone in the market because as the current president shows, too many americans are fucking stupid. It remains the dominant phone because too many americans are fucking stupid.

            It’s a much more complex phone today but don’t worry, most americans don’t know how to use all the features anyway because they are too fucking stupid.

            • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              8 days ago

              I think one of the main reasons Blackberry was swiftly killed off by the iPhone was that their devices had tiny non-touch screens that used 16-bit color, and RIM were unwilling to move on from that until it was far too late. The other reason is that the Blackberry app development environment was orders of magnitude more atrocious than anything else I worked with in my 25-year career. The development environment for iPhones was the second-worst but still massively better than Blackberry; even if RIM had moved to upgrade their devices, they never could have gotten anyone to develop apps for them.

    • forbiddencherry@lemmy.todayEnglish
      4·
      8 days ago

      I love that “Mobile Web” is still larger than “Android” and also larger than “iOS” (usually). Nag screen didn’t work!

      • mursejoy@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        8 days ago

        I basically can only browse in a private window because of the incessant nag screen.

        Once that gets patched out it’ll be only Lemmy for me. I just hope a larger community of people move over.

    • fizzle@quokk.auEnglish
      5·
      9 days ago

      I’m concerned at redlib’s viability long term. There was anotherpost here a few days ago that said the whole of reddit was login only. If that happens Redlib is dead.

      That said, I can’t imagine why reddit would do that and it seems unlikely.

      • hirihit640@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        9 days ago

        Can’t redlib operators just use a reddit account for? Login to get past the login wall, and then fetch requests for other users

        • m0stlyharmless@lemmy.zipEnglish
          3·
          9 days ago

          RedLib presently spoofs the OAuth tokens and behavior of the official Android app to access the website, so they are kind of doing something like that already.

          The challenge for instance operators is routing the traffic appropriately to avoid the inevitable rate limiting from Reddit for popular RedLib instances.

          Instance operators end up using a variety of approaches to get around this such as having multiple RedLib instances each with its own IP so that if one becomes rate limited, their site can switch over to another instance while the rate limit cools down.

        • fizzle@quokk.auEnglish
          2·
          9 days ago

          That’s a potential solution but there might be problems I haven’t considered.

          Presently that’s not how it works though, redlib doesn’t log in.

    • takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      8 days ago

      There is libredirect browser extension that allows to rotate between the instances offloading load (I think safereddit.com has highest because the URL is easy to change.

  • Capybara_mdp@reddthat.comEnglish
    24·
    8 days ago

    While I’ve been on Lemmy for a while, I haven’t really seen any hobby - centric or geek centric areas.

    I’ll miss the movie threads in particular, but there were a ton of active crafts, art & ttrpg threads to get inspiration from. Any suggestions?